Small proxy server Windows

Backup proxies and transport modes

October 31, 2018 – 11:20 am

We are now ready for the second post in this series, and we will now cover the VMware Backup Proxy. This is truly the workhorse of your backup infrastructure, so this will definitely be of interest to many readers!

Best practices for VMware Backup Proxies

One of the first questions to ask is: “How many proxies should be in use?” The prevailing logic is to that the more proxies that are in place the better the performance and distribution. But, be very careful to ensure that Backup I/O Control is in use. Otherwise, the proxies run the risk of taking too much cycles from the primary storage systems. Conversely for smaller environments, the basic controls on the repository can set throttling and connection limits that will effectively limit what the proxies can transfer. The figure below shows this basic repository control (but the repository will be covered more in the next post of the series) in the properties:

CPU and RAM for the VMware Backup Proxy are greatly controlled by the compression settings used for a backup job. Generally speaking, keep the default compression level (optimal) set in backup jobs or be ready to add resources to the proxies. Also it is worth pointing out that RAM usage on a target proxy of a replication job is something to watch.

Let’s talk transport modes!

Speaking of transport modes, it’s a good idea to have one secondary Hot Add proxy per cluster for restores only. This is very important when you consider you may be doing a backup during the time when you need to do a restore! Meaning, if you have designed a requisite number of proxies for backups but you have to do a restore during that time, you need more resources and connectivity to do that task and you don’t want to have to cancel or delay a backup job to do a restore.

In regards to transport modes, there are four choices in a Veeam VMware Backup Proxy: